丑奴儿·书博山道中壁 ·辛弃疾

少年不识愁滋味，爱上层楼。爱上层楼，为赋新词强说愁。
而今识尽愁滋味，欲说还休。欲说还休，却道天凉好个秋。

Why so many poorly rated Wii Games?

Welcome to my blog. I am facinated with games, be it handheld, console or PC. Currently all three next gen console are fighting for a bigger share of the market. I follow them closely and try to analyse trends and development. Among them my pet interest is Wii.

Wii was widely expected by the market to be a flop. Fans cried foul our its name, other scorn at its lack of HD quality graphics, while others feel that it might go down like Gamecube due to lack of third party support.

However contrary to popular belief, it only took Wii less than a year to reclaim the throne as the best selling next gen console. With this came a proliferation of games. Some of them have exceptional quality like Twilight Princess, RE 4 Wii Edition, Zack and Wiki. At the other extreme end, we have games that are a pure waste of your time and money. Incidentally some of the company are more prone to produce such titles than others.

I'm appalled at the number of Wii games within this category. Once in a while, other next gen console might get some poorly rated titles. But if one were to go through any game review, if there is a poorly rated title, most of the time they came from Wii.

Why is this so? What could the root of such proliferation of poor quality Wii games be? Nintendo and some of the top third party company (e.g. Capcom, Konami) has produced hit after hit on the Wii. It appears that they know what goes into making a fantastic Wii game. Metroid Prime 3 show that high quality graphics can also be produced on the Wii. Wii sports and Super Mario Galaxy show that Wii games can be fun and entertaining. No one complains that RE4 is less fun on the Wii. Though RE4 appears on Wii's predecessor and several other platforms (e.g. PS2 and PC), when RE4 for Wii was launched, Capcom still manage to sell more than 500k copies.

So what's wrong with the other third party software company. Why is Wii flooded with so many poorly rated games?

After combing tons of literature, forums, blogs etc, here's some of the possible reasons.

• cheaper to produce games for Wii than other next gen consoles, faster production time, no need to worry about HD graphics

• Wii has sold the most next gen console

• Wii appeals to a greater demographic spread thereby increasing the chances that someone will buy the game

• companies cashing in on the current craze for Wii. Similar to the dot.com boom, they hope consumers will grab anything they throw at them

• or could it be the poorer quality of approving games for release on the specific platform

• lack of understanding and implementation of next gen control functionality in the games

• companies formerly producing games for last gen console creating or porting their games onto Wii to catch the Wii fever. Its definitely cheaper than to produce the games from scratch.

• game rating company having unreasonable expectation of Wii games. E.g. lamenting its lack of HD graphics, lack of online features, comparing them against their PS3 and Xbox 360 simultaneous releases
  

Most of the time its should be a combination of the above factors.

Games in this category suffer from one or more of the following

• N64 era graphics
  
• poor Wiimote and unintuitive controls
  
• poorly plan storyboard
• boring and repetitive actions
  

In one of the recent issue of EGM, it highlighted that in the past Nintendo uses "Official Seal of Quality" sticker on all games. Now it no longer uses the label choosing the "Official Nintendo seal" on all games instead. Why was "quality" dropped?

Wii has seen too many mini games. There are not many games in other categories and developers can consider them:

a) Survival horror e.g. RE4 and hopefully RE5, Silent Hill
b) RPG (Kingdom hearts, Tales of series, Dragon Quest IX)
c) Arcade Shooters like Geometry War, 1942, Raiden
d) Stealth action e.g. Metal Gear Solid (Twin snake on GC was fantastic), Tenchu
e) Sports (Virtua Tennis 3, Boxing, Top Spin)
f) Action (Ninja Gaiden, PS2's God's hand)
g) RTS (Warcraft - with Wiimote as pointer and the A-B button, it can function like a mouse)
h) FPS (COD4, COD3 was great)
i) Time Crisis

For mini games, developers can consider developing games like
i) Photo hunt (and other from DS's Touchmaster)
ii) Zookeeper or known as Zoo Puzzle in PS2
iii) Whack a mole

In conclusion, we hope that now that Wii is the most popular console, we hope many more company will put in their effort to produce many good Wii title for consumers.

Top 5 Wii Games of the Year

Welcome.

This my first blog posting. Since its end of the year below is my pick of Best Wii Game for the year.

Zack & Wiki - Quest for Barbaros Treasure(Capcom)
Resident Evil 4 Wii Edition (Capcom)
Metroid Prime 3 Corruption (Nintendo)
Carnival Games (Global Star)
Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles (Capcom)

Interesting observations
------------------------
Wii has been labelled as a console for non-hardcore gamers. Oddly majority of the games that made the list are considered hardcore games.

Nintendo is known to be producing solid titles and there are always allegations that third party games are not as good as first party games. Not true. Among the titles shown above, only 1 came from Nintendo, the rest are made by third party developers.

Two of the titles came from the Resident Evil franchise. Sadly, there are no more announcement of new RE titles coming to Wii.

Among the games, Carnival games is the only game in the list that has been slammed by critics. Some critic even give it a score lesser than 5 on a scale of 1 to 10. On the contrary, users appears to be enjoying this game. The average rating is in the region of 7 to 8.